… in Business Organizations and Information Technologies

Envisioning Innovation in Service Systems: Induction, Abduction and Deduction

In engagements with clients/customers, my work often includes system envisioning: facilitating the description of a collective desirable future (on a horizon of maybe 1 to 3 years out). Once a group has converged on a future state or vision, moving forward is merely a matter of will. Defining that future state, however, is more art than science. In addition, with many more businesses operating as service systems, getting a handle on the invisible work that will be performed can be a challenge. Work practices will coevolve with new technologies in ways unfamiliar to experiences to date.

In discussions with my colleagues, differences between their engagement approach and mine became clearer. I understand and appreciate the process-based methods (e.g. process consultation by Ed Schein) used by large consulting teams, but my typical engagement is now timeboxed to a few weeks elapsed time, with just a few interviewers. Some executive sponsors may ask for an interview guide in advance of coming onsite, but I don’t use a formally-structured guide. The context for 60-to-90 minute interviews are light — we want people to talk about time-intensive activities and annoyances in their jobs — and generally find that interviewees would be happy if small adjustment could be made so that each would have to do less work.

Reflecting on these methods, I’ve seen a pattern of three stages in this approach:

(1) Induction: Rather than coming in with a preconceived model of how work gets done in a particular business, let those closest to the activities speak freely. From the data collected, converge on common patterns in issues and/or problems that can be reviewed, validated and prioritized for resolution.

(2) Abduction: Test the feasibility and desirability of various alternative paths and/or options. The future could be a small step from current practices, or a bigger leap where some discomfort may occur. Evaluation of the preferred future state is subjective, coalescing around sensemaking with a variety of perspectives being voiced.

(3) Deduction: Once the desired future state is clear, then constructing a roadmap to get from the current state is relatively straightforward.

This whole idea has been expanded in a paper, “Envisioning Innovation in Service Systems: Induction, Abduction and Deduction”, presented at the ISSS Brisbane 2009 meeting, and now posted on the Coevolving Innovation Commons. Here’s the abstract.

An initiative to transform or redesign a service system can be centered on envisioning a future that may be explicit or implicit, shared or tacit. When that future represents a discontinuous change from the current state, detailed analysis from a single frame (e.g. process modeling) may mislead or confuse collective choices and priorities.

Four envisioning engagements – across a variety of service businesses – are reviewed as case studies to surface commonalities in approach. Success in the engagements has largely been attributed to the sequencing of consultations into sequential phases of induction, abduction and then deduction. Challenges to adoption of this three-phase approach are outlined, as a departure from current practice in envisioning innovations.

Following an inductive style of description, conclusions are presented with theoretical saturation of research concepts based on the philosophy of phenomenology.

The levels of skills required to successfully execute this approach aren’t clear, so I won’t claim that the method is universally replicable. In addition, techniques are unlikely to scale when the engagement team gets large. For more details, see the full paper.

How using open data science has worked for the Ocean Health Index. It's impressive how big a difference their open processes have made on their progress. https://opensource.com/article/18/12/protecting-world-oceans #OpenScience #OpenData

@Matt_Noyes In the federated wiki community, experiments with Beaker Browser and Hashbase.io continue, http://forage.rodwell.me/view/federated-wiki-on-dat . In-progress work on DAT with Glitch https://wiki.dbbs.co/view/wiki-and-glitch . I tried DAT on laptop to friend&apos;s laptop without hashbase, non-technical users will hesitate to open up a port on a home router with news about hackers on IoT refrigerators.

Think that you’ll be working past age 65? #OntarioSecuritiesCommission 2018 survey says >25% were forced to retire, 59% retired voluntarily. > Just more than one-quarter of them were forced to retire, possibly for medical reasons, corporate restructuring or reaching a mandatory retirement age. Fifty-seven per cent said they retired voluntarily, while the rest said they […]

Chinese #dissidents ask #Twitter to consider dual key accounts, where deletion of a Twitter account requires two approvals.Chinese police have been forcing people to delete their Twitter accounts against their will. I wonder if these deleted accounts could be reinstated?It is an interesting idea, a unique use case specific to #China, but useful to them. […]

Think that you’ll be working past age 65? OSC @smarter_money 2018 survey says >25% were forced to retire, 59% retired voluntarily. … results of a new investor survey by the Ontario Securities Commission suggest that working longer isn’t viable for many people. > The survey of 2,000 people posed a series of questions to pre-retirees and people who […]

The traditional separation of mind and body is dissolved by @ISTDP, departing from traditional western medicine. Dr. Abbass, the head of Dalhousie University’s Centre for Emotions and Health, treats patients with these unexplained medical symptoms, a phenomenon also known as somatoform disorder, with an innovative form of talk therapy that’s producing impressive results. Called Intensive Short-Term […]

Women may more comfortable as anonymous on the World Wide Web, rather than contributing towards collaborative work such as Wikipedia. A comprehensive survey conducted in 2008 found that only 13 % of Wikipedia contributors are women. [….] Significant gender differences were found in confidence in expertise, discomfort with editing, and response to critical feedback. Women […]

Organizations need #communityship, as naturally-engaging #leadership in collective interests, says #HenryMintzberg @Mintzberg141. I’ll bet that beyond leadership is a profound sense of communityship. (Never heard that word? I made it up1, to put leadership in its place, namely to support communityship.) Effective organizations are communities of human beings, not collections of human resources. How can […]

As @relentlesseco writes that employees want meaningful work, perhaps the Quality of Working Life research back into the 1970s might be rediscovered. If you find “employee engagement” hard to take, “meaningful work” may also have your eyes glazing over, but that is another phrase worth noting. According to a survey of 2,000 U.S. workers by human-resources […]

Washington suffers from #Gerontocracy; Ottawa is 1-1/2 #Generations younger. To gauge the measure of the gerontocracy, Ottawa offers a remarkable comparison. The average age of Washington’s leaders – Mr. Trump, Ms. Pelosi, Mr. McConnell – is 75. In Canada, the three major party leaders – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer and NDP […]

The WordPress O2 plugin with P2-Breathe theme results in a Facebook-like or Twitter-like streaming interface. The idea was first presented in 2013, evolving from the P2 theme in 2009 (originally launched as Prologue in 2008) when hosted on wordpress.com. “Beau…Read more ›

Talk at the Centre for Human Ecology, Glasgow, announced at http://www.che.ac.uk/tim-ingold-talks-about-the-sustainability-of-everything-10th-sept-2016/ Video posted at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncLv9Gk7XrI and https://vimeo.com/182572764 This digest was created by editing the text transcript generated by Youtube. View the video yourself for a more authentic reproduction. Lapses, grammatical…Read more ›

Plenary presentation by Tim Ingold, at the 2nd @AIBR_ International Conference of Anthropology. The 2nd AIBR International Conference of Anthropology brings together anthropologists from different parts of the world under the theme “Identity: Bridges, Thresholds, and Barriers.” [….] [6:58] So…Read more ›

Responses @HenryChesbrough on service platforms, living labs, and the future of open innovation. Since 2003, he has provided a precise definition, as the godfather of open innovation. InFocus Podcast with Dr. Henry Chesbrough. Dr. Chesbrough is the Program Director for…Read more ›

History of open source at IBM from 1998 @tmmoore_1 @ApacheCon NA 2016, and current IBM Open Cloud Architecture. Todd Moore, VP of Open Technology at IBM will share a retrospective of IBMs deep roots ASF and then follow with some…Read more ›